Meet news:yc.

The open source Hacker News client for your iOS device.

news:yc is powerful

Now there's a native iPhone interface for pretty much everything Hacker News offers.

The top stories and the new stories pages are the most visible, but you can also access the best stories, new comments, active discussions, and more from the rightmost tab. Also supported are user profiles: tap the person icon to view the profile of the person that submitted it, and view stories and comments they posted.

More important than that, though, news:yc supports more than just reading Hacker News. Once you sign in, you can vote, flag, and reply to any comment or story you can on Hacker News itself. Have something cool to share? Posting both new submissions and anew "Ask HN" posts is also supported.

Finally, news:yc is integrated with Instapaper and Readability to easily save and format articles. For sharing, just copy the link into your app of choice, or send it with Mail.

news:yc is usable

Much of news:yc takes inspiration from the very best iPhone apps. Submission screens are based around Mail, comment browsing is inspired by Tweetbot, and the navigation structure (as well as pull-to-refresh) is similar to the old favorite Tweetie. Other parts are completely new: the comments have a custom layout to easily scan and read on the small screen.

With news:yc, you won't ever hit the wrong voting arrow. The flag button is in the middle, in fact, to make this very obvious: you are not going to tap the wrong arrow. I've been known to click the wrong arrow with a mouse. It's not easy to get it right. But fat fingers — finally — are not an issue with news:yc.

The best part of news:yc is that it passes the so-called "Safari test": do I want to use this app instead of the website in Safari? For me, the answer is "yes", the advantages of larger vote buttons and avoiding the painful side-to-side scrolling alone would be enough, but news:yc has everything needed for day-to-day browsing.

ready for ipad

With news:yc 1.2, your favorite iPhone Hacker News client is now on your iPad. And not just as a pixel-doubled, bordered iPhone app, it's now fully built for the device.

On the left, you'll find a slide out (or always visible, in landscape) panel to access the list of stories. Everything you love from the iPhone app is there, from top stories to active discussions. On the right, you'll see the content. Comments are specially formatted for the larger display, and articles look great.

There's no need to get a new app, either: news:yc is a universal app, supporting everything from the iPhone 3GS to the latest iPad in just one download. There's really no better way to read Hacker News on your iPad than news:yc.

Contributing

The news:yc code is on GitHub, BSD licensed. Pull requests are encouraged, but feel free to use the code in your own projects as well. (I do ask, however, that although the license permits it, you don't submit exact news:yc clones to the App Store without asking first.)

Inside news:yc, the parsing and rendering of Hacker News is done by HNKit. HNKit is not tied to iOS, so if you want to build a Mac Hacker News client, HNKit should reduce the amount of work required.

Credits

news:yc would have been impossible without the hard work of many open source projects. The great libxml2 is used for scraping and is involved in rendering comments. Other, smaller parts of projects are also used: the pull-to-refresh is derived enormego and three20, URL parsing is from Telekenesis, HTML entity parsing is from MWFeedParser, and scrolling smoothness is from atebits. Finally, I'd like to thank Maurizio Vitale (mvit) for the awesome icons and for listening to my silly requests.